OCTOBER 2011
NEWS
E X C E L
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C R E A T E
from the Department of Mathematical Sciences
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D I S C O V E R
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C O N N E C T
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E X P L O R E
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S E R V E
FEATURES
Kel ly Gor h am
CASEY DONOVEN: GOLDWATER SCHOLAR
Casey Donoven is a math major from Kremlin, Montana who recently
won a Goldwater Scholarship. The Goldwater is the nation’s premier
scholarship for undergraduates studying math, natural sciences and
engineering. The Goldwater Foundation was established in 1986 and
MSU is one of the nation’s top institutions for Goldwater recipients
since that time. As a student at Havre High School, Casey sometimes
taught math and chemistry when his teachers were gone for the day.
As a high school senior, he was one of eight students across the state
Casey Donoven
who competed in the “Who Wants to be a Mathematician?” contest
when it came to Montana. Casey is a Vice-President of MSU’s chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, a
national honor society, and a member of the MSU Honors Program. He came to MSU because of his Presidential Scholarship and because of our strong math and science programs.
Dr. Lukas Geyer taught Casey in several classes and supervised his undergraduate research
project in fractal geometry. Lukas noted that Casey is creative, curious and has a good grasp
of mathematical patterns. Casey was also one of three MSU students who went to Bergen,
Norway in the summer of 2010 to research carbon sequestration.
DAN CORNISH: MATHEMATICS, PHOTOGRAPHY AND MEDICAL SCHOOL
Kelly Gorham
Dan Cornish of Butte, Montana is an MSU graduate in mathematics
and photography who is currently taking pre-med courses at MSU.
He recently received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach in Turkey. Dan
credits excellent faculty at MSU who inspired him, including Dr.
Russ Walker in mathematics. Dan was an ASMSU senator, played
MSU team soccer and was a tutor for MSU’s TRIO program for
underrepresented students. While an undergraduate, he received an
MSU Undergraduate Scholars Program grant to do a photography
project in Turkey. He is excited to go back to photograph Turkish
Dan Cornish
youth as well as teach English. Since graduating from MSU in 2009,
Dan worked for Canon Photography as a teacher and guide for photography caravan courses
in national parks and also became a certified EMT.
JOHN BORKOWSKI RECEIVES INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION
K elly Gorham
Dr. John Borkowski has spent considerable time
in Thailand over the past several years, primarily at
Thammasat University in Bangkok. This includes
several invited visits and a longer stay as a Fulbright
Fellow. This past summer he was awarded the
Thammasat Honorary Plaque in recognition of
his continuous and outstanding contributions to
Thammasat University. This award is given annually
to selected alumni, individuals or organizations who
have contributed greatly to the esteem and prestige
of the university. Recently John has worked here at
MSU with four visiting scholars from Thailand.
John Borkowski
WORKING OFF-CAMPUS
Many of our majors spend summers, semesters, or entire years off-campus, studying and
conducting research. Three such students are
Sarah Sandford, Christina Watts, and Katelyn
Weber. Sarah studied abroad the entire 201011 year at the University of Plymouth on the
southwest coast of England through the International Student Exchange Program (ISEP).
In spite of the differences in the educational
systems, she learned tremendous amounts and
found her Nonlinear Systems class to be the
most exciting because of the variety of real
world applications. While in Plymouth she
volunteered to help teach math at a language
school for refugees and asylum seekers. She
also traveled to London, Oxford and Madrid
as well as many small towns on England’s
southwest coast. Christina spent the summer
of 2010 on a Research Experiences for Undergraduates project at Humbolt State University
modeling the population of the Western
Snowy Plover, an endangered shorebird on
the west coast. She followed that up with an
Undergraduate Scholars Program award fall
2010 here on campus to complete her work.
Then last June she attended the 2011 World
Conference on Natural Resource Modeling
in Ottawa, Canada where she presented her
work. She won a student award: The Natural
Resource Modeling Journal Prize for Student
Presentations. She was the only undergraduate
student to win an award! Katelyn was selected
for a position in the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) Summer
Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)
program at its Engineering Laboratory in
Gaithersburg, Maryland. Her project was
in the Sustainable Manufacturing Division
working to help US manufacturers measure
the sustainability of their products in an effort
to improve technology to meet international
standards. She was involved in uncertainty
quantification for their models, writing code
to propagate variability through multiple
calculations.
Department of Mathematical Sciences News
FACULTY NEWS
MAURICE BURKE AND A LOVE OF MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
Dr. Maurice Burke first came to our Department in September, 1971, as an undergraduate student pursuing a double major
in mathematics and philosophy. He fondly
remembers visiting with his advisor, Dr.
Byron McAllister, in the old departmental
offices that were housed in the annex of the
Renne Library. Byron advised him to minor
in computer science since “they say computers might be important some day.” Today, 40
years later, Maurice continues to be deeply
interested in the uses of technology for the
teaching of mathematics. He is also retiring
from MSU after 24 years as a professor of
mathematics education.
Upon graduating from Montana State
University in 1974, Maurice attended Oxford
University as a Rhodes Scholar, completing
a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy
in 1976. While pursuing his doctorate in
Mathematics (with a minor in Education) at
the University of Wisconsin – Madison, he
interrupted his graduate studies for two years
to complete a secondary teacher certification
program and to gain experience teaching
mathematics at the high school level. He was
awarded his Ph.D. in 1984.
After brief stays at the University of Texas
at San Antonio and Weber State University,
Dr. Burke joined our Department in January, 1988. He was responsible for millions
of dollars in grants to MSU and the State
of Montana and co-directed the Systemic
Initiative for Montana Mathematics and
Science (SIMMS) project (1992-1996), an
effort to revise the high school mathematics
curriculum into an integrated curriculum
focusing on mathematical modeling using
INTERDISCIPLINARY NSF GRANTS INVESTIGATE MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES
Dr. Isaac Klapper is collaborating with multidisciplinary teams to develop modeling and
Mathematics graduate student Shane Nowack (left) and
faculty member Isaac Klapper (right) collect samples from
an Octopus Spring effluent channel in Yellowstone.
theoretical tools for understanding form and
function of microbial communities, while at
the same time aiming to train students capable of working across disciplines. This work
was initially funded by a $100,000 National
Science Foundation (NSF) Interdisciplinary
Grant in the Mathematical Sciences, where
he devoted an entire year working in the
lab of Dr. Dave Ward in the Department of
Land Resources and Environmental Sciences
at MSU. This funding was followed by a
$750,000 NSF Collaboration in Mathematical Geosciences grant where Isaac, together
STUDENT NEWS
MATHEMATICS COMPETITIONS
Nothing is more stereotypical than math
students competing in a mathematical contest.
Well, guess what? Last year we had two such
events. One is the Putnam Math Competition,
an annual contest for college students established in 1938. Each year over 2000 students
spend 6 hours trying to solve 12 problems.
Individual and team winners get some money
and a few minutes of fame. This year our
Math Department team outdid itself. Several
MSU students scored well above the national
median, and David Halat achieved our highest
individual result, ranking 342nd among 4296
participants. Our team, consisting of Casey
Donoven, David Halat, and Jeremy Schwend,
technology. Between
1996 and 2000, he
led the mathematics education group
in transforming
our masters degree
for teachers into an
Maurice Burke
online program. That
program remains one of the best and most
popular masters programs for mathematics
teachers in the Western United States.
Dr. Burke has published numerous articles
and book chapters in respected professional
venues. He was the editor for the 2000
Yearbook of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and the high
school editor for the NCTM Navigations
Series. Maurice and his wife, Polly, will make
Montana their permanent home.
with MSU colleagues from Mathematical
Sciences and Engineering, are studying the
biology, chemistry, and physics of microbially-induced carbonate mineralization and its
applications to carbon sequestration and to
bioremediation. In a third and most recent
project, funded by a $250,000 NSF grant,
Isaac, together with colleagues from Agriculture and Engineering, are leading an effort to
construct a computer model representation
of a microbial ecosystem living in the effluent
channel of a Yellowstone hot spring. Multidisciplinary cohorts like these that Isaac has
forged are likely to be central to the future of
research in microbiology.
Enrollment at MSU saw yet
another dramatic increase this fall to 14,153. Our
department continues to mirror these increases.
We have 24 new full-time graduate students, bringing our total full-time enrollment to 71. In addition,
we have 30 teachers around the country enrolled
in our distance delivery graduate program. We have
an excellent new class of 22 undergraduate math
majors and our undergraduate program now has
131 majors. Last year we awarded 23 B.S. degrees,
17 M.S. degrees, and one Ph.D degree.
ENROLLMENT:
placed 86th out of 442 teams nationwide.
Both individually and as a team, this is the
best MSU has done in many years.
A less traditional competition is the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications
(COMAP) Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) competition. This presents teams
of three undergraduate students with a choice
of two highly open-ended “real-world”
problems, for which teams have just over 4
days to research, model mathematically, and
create a formal write up. This year we had
three teams compete.
Math majors Eric Fink, David Halat, and
Kelly Spendlove formed one team. In the
nearly 30 hours they spent wrestling with their
problem, they wrote over 1,000 lines of code,
covered untold chalkboards, and eventually
produced a 3,000 word paper, for which they
received an “Honorable Mention” designation.
There were 2,775 teams worldwide in the
competition and only 30% earned this
distinction.